I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Friday, March 10, 2017

Obama’s Acting “No-Borders” Boss Of USCIS Resigned

Acting Director of USCIS Lori Scialabba
Resigns at Homeland Security: Lori Scialabba, the Acting Director at the United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the Department of
Homeland Security, “announced her coming retirement from federal service” on
Tuesday, a spokesperson for the department has confirmed to Breitbart News.

Scialabba was number one on the list of eight Obama holdover bureaucrats
identified by Breitbart News that President Trump “should fire or remove at
Homeland Security.” According to a source within the Department of Homeland
Security, Scialabba sent the following message to her colleagues at USCIS about
her resignation on Tuesday:

Dear Colleagues,

After almost 33 years of public service, I will be retiring from the
federal government at the end of March. I consider myself very fortunate to
have worked with USCIS for over 10 years, first as the associate director of
the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate, and then serving
as your deputy director for nearly six years. While the decision to leave USCIS
was difficult, the opportunity presented was right for me. I have accepted a
position in the private sector and look forward to the new challenge.

I come from a strong public service background and I’ve been lucky to
work in agencies with a meaningful mission. The work USCIS performs is of great
importance, and has been an extraordinary part of my life. My entire career has
been dedicated to the fascinating and complicated subject of immigration law,
policy, and operations and I have enjoyed the challenge and reward of serving
in the federal government.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation
to all of you. During my time at USCIS, I have remained impressed by the
quality and dedication of the workforce. You work tirelessly to fulfill our
mission in a professional, compassionate manner while ensuring the integrity of
the immigration system and the security of our nation. I am very proud of
everything you have accomplished and very proud to have been the deputy
director of USCIS.

Best wishes,

Lori Scialabba

Acting Director

“I can confirm the text you sent
[above] is not a resignation letter – it is from an all-USCIS email dated March
7 from the acting director which informed agency employees of her decision to
retire from federal service at the end of March after almost 33 years of public
service,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security tells
Breitbart News.

Scialabba made headlines during her
brief tenure with the Trump administration when she openly defied the
president. “One week after President Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise
by curbing the arrival of refugees from several Muslim-majority countries, a
senior bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security countermanded his
presidential directive,” Breitbart News reported on February 22:

The acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
of Homeland Security, Lori Scialabba, sent out a February 2 memo directing her
employees to continue processing documents for refugees from the (seven Muslim)
countries named by Donald Trump.

“I would bet that Scialabba will be
joining a law team that will be filing lawsuits against Trump,” a source within
the Department of Homeland Security tells Breitbart News.

One week after President Donald Trump
fulfilled a campaign promise by curbing the arrival of refugees from several
Muslim-majority countries, a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland
Security countermanded his presidential directive.

The acting director of U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services of Homeland Security, Lori Scialabba, sent out a
February 2 memo directing her employees to continue processing documents for
refugees from the countries named by Donald Trump. The memo was leaked to The
Intercept website and was made public on Document Cloud.

According to The Intercept:

LESS THAN ONE week after senior
leadership at the Department of Homeland Security issued a policy guidance that
threatened to bring much of the government’s asylum and refugee work to a
grinding halt, a new directive issued to employees appears to reverse key
elements of the procedures U.S. immigration officials are expected to follow…

According to an internal memo issued
Thursday by Lori Scialabba, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, the portion of Trump’s controversial ban pertaining to
the issuance of visas and other benefits to immigrants from the targeted
countries “does not affect USCIS adjudication of applications and petitions
filed for or on behalf of individuals in the United States regardless of their
country or nationality.”

The new memo, obtained by The
Intercept, stands in direct contradiction to the earlier DHS guidance, which
effectively blocked U.S. immigration officials from issuing decisions in any
adjustment of status cases for nationals of the banned countries — including
applications for permanent residency and naturalization by individuals already
in the United States.

Scialabba’s actions spotlight the need
for Trump to nominate his top appointees so they can clean house in the many
agencies that they were elected to oversee. Trump nominated General John Kelly
as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and he was confirmed
January 20, but much of the implementation of the department’s policies is
still controlled by holdover bureaucrats, such as Scialabba.

Until they are removed, sources say,
the Department of Homeland Security will not come close to implementing
President Trump’s agenda, even with Kelly at the top of the organization.

“It normally takes a president more
than a year to get the lion’s share of his appointees in place, leaving the
management of agencies and departments in the hands of career employees who are
not in position to make critical and long-term decisions,” Max Steir reported
at Bloomberg Views.

Sources tell Breitbart News that the Department of Homeland Security,
and in particular U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS], is a
hotbed of career open borders ideologues, many of whom intend to directly and
indirectly subvert President Trump’s agenda.

“If you go down the list of current
management at USCIS, probably 80 percent are open-borders left-wing
ideologues,” a source, who has worked at the Department of Homeland Security
for more than a decade and supports President Trump’s agenda, tells Breitbart
News.

“USCIS probably has the most violent
anti-border people in the United States. These are in the management. These do
not believe in borders. I know them personally,” the source says. “I am deeply
concerned President Trump will not clean the deepest swamp, USCIS,” the source
says:

All the work that is done on “vetting”
of aliens is primarily for only two reasons; to keep bad guys out or to find
and remove bad guys from the country. While everyone agrees that CBP [Customs
and Border Patrol] is the main agency to keep bad guys out, nobody ever notices
that USCIS is the agency responsible for denying applications in order to
remove avenues of relief for aliens that need to be removed.

Billions can be spent on border
controls, but if USCIS isn’t on board, every alien that steps foot in the U.S.
could find protection to stay. Even if they eventually receive a removal order,
USCIS can, by policy, keep them in the U.S. for decades.

Scialabba, who has worked as USCIS
deputy director since 2011, is one of
the most effective open borders ideologues at the Department of Homeland
Security, the source says. She “served as acting director of USCIS from
December 2013 to July 2014” in the Obama administration, according to her bio
on the Department of Homeland Security’s website:

From 2006 to 2011, Scialabba was
associate director of USCIS Refugee, Asylum and International Operations. She
concurrently served from 2007 to 2009 as a senior advisor to former Secretary
of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on issues affecting Iraqi refugees…

Her career began in October 1985 with
DOJ through the Attorney General’s Honors Program. There, she litigated
deportation cases as a trial attorney for INS [the Immigration and
Naturalization Service] in Chicago.

As a career civil servant, and not a political
appointee, Scialabba is protected by The Pendleton Act, which makes it very
difficult to fire career bureaucrats. However, nothing prevents Secretary Kelly
or President Trump from immediately beginning the process of removing her from
any position of authority at USCIS.

Almost Every Iraqi Muslim Applying For Political Asylum Gets It

The case for removing Scialabba from
USCIS entirely is particularly compelling. In her previous position at USCIS,
Director of Refugee Asylum and International Operations, “it was common
knowledge that her email was directly available to anyone in the Iraqi
community who wanted to apply for asylum,” the source adds.

“Iraqis that come into the country on various other visas were applying
for asylum right away. Their cases would be denied because they didn’t qualify,
they didn’t meet any of the five grounds for asylum. They didn’t have well
founded fear, they weren’t persecuted,” the source notes.

“Any Iraqi that was denied asylum, they would email Scialabba directly.
She would email her subordinates at the local offices, and those cases would be
re-opened and approved, basically to please her,” the source said.

One attorney in one of the eight cities
where local asylum approval officers were located appeared to have a direct
line to Sciallabba as well. Iraqi immigrants would flock to that city because
that particular lawyer, working through the local USCIS office, had a virtual
100 percent record of securing asylum approvals for Iraqis.

“I don’t know if you could make a case
Scialabba had broken any laws, but it certainly was unethical because she was
giving advantage to one nationality over all other nationalities,” the source
tells Breitbart News.

A 2009 article in The New Yorker
confirmed many of the details the source provided to Breitbart News. George
Packer wrote in the March 9, 2009, edition of The New Yorker:

I was going to write a post in praise of an obscure career civil servant
who does her job with unusual conscientiousness. Her name is Lori Scialabba,
and she is the—we’re dealing with the federal bureaucracy here—associate
director of the Refugee, Asylum, and Operations Directorate at the Department
of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as
serving as the department’s senior adviser on Iraqi refugees.

In other words, she’s the person appointed to cut through the red tape
that was keeping all but a trickle of Iraqi refugees from reaching these
shores.

An Iraqi friend with an enterprising spirit began writing e-mails to
Scialabba last May—first on behalf of his own petition for asylum, which seemed
to be languishing somewhere in the system, then on behalf of friends waiting in
Baghdad to hear about their immigration applications, which also seemed to be
languishing, then on behalf of his in-laws in Syria, where they were also
languishing.

Pretty soon, Scialabba was hearing from Iraqis on a regular basis. And
this is why she deserves some sort of medal: far from discouraging the
correspondence, she always wrote back quickly.

My friend’s first e-mail has a time stamp of 2:26 P.M. Scialabba’s reply
came at 4:52 P.M. on the same day. He thanked her at 8:21 P.M., to which she
replied at 8:37 A.M. the next morning. One of her e-mails, to an anxious
Iraqi-refugee applicant who was languishing in Jordan, was sent at 10:06 P.M.
on a Friday evening.

To Iraqis who had grown accustomed to a sluggish and indifferent
American bureaucracy after growing up with a sinister Iraqi one, Scialabba’s
responsiveness must have seemed angelic. And her alacrity was matched by her
efficacy: she always got the case moving, and she persisted until it was
resolved.

“If Scialabba stays where she is at
USCIS, and President Trump appoints a political hack to run the agency, she
will continue to lead USCIS down the path of destruction to this country,” the
source says. Scialabba’s actions at USCIS subsequent to the inauguration of
President Trump appear to support that view of her stewardship there.

She (rebelliously) issued her countermanding memo against (President
Trump) on February 2, 2017 — one day before Federal District Judge James Robart
issued his controversial temporary restraining order halting President Trump’s
January 27 executive order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist
Entry into the United States” nationwide.